The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time #3)

The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time #3) Page 106

“Well, if you are not going to tell me, I am going to sleep. Blow out the lamps, will you?” Thom rolled on his side and pulled a pillow over his head.

Even after Mat had stripped off down to his smallclothes and crawled under the blankets — after blowing out the lamps — he could not sleep, though Mallia had done well by himself with a good feather mattress. He had been right about Thom's snoring, and that pillow muffled nothing. It sounded as if Thom were cutting wood crossgrain with a rusty saw. And he could not stop thinking. How had Nynaeve and Egwene, and Elayne, gotten that paper from the Amyrlin? They had to be involved with the Amyrlin Seat herself — in some plot, one of those White Tower machinations — but now that he thought about it, they had to be holding something back from the Amyrlin, too.

“ 'Please carry a letter to my mother, Mat,' ” he said softly, in a highpitched, mocking voice. “Fool! The Amyrlin would have sent a Warder with any letter from the DaughterHeir to the Queen. Blind fool, wanting to get out of the Tower so bad I couldn't see it.” Thom's snore seemed to trumpet agreement.

Most of all, though, he thought about luck, and footpads.

The first bump of something against the stern barely registered on him. He paid no attention to a thump and scuffle from the deck overhead, or the tread of boots. The vessel itself made enough noises, and there had to be someone on deck for the ship to make its way downriver. But stealthy footsteps in the passageway leading to his door merged with thoughts of footpads and made his ears prick up.

He nudged Thom in the ribs with an elbow. “Wake up,” he said softly. “There's somebody outside in the hall.” He was already easing himself off the bed, hoping the cabin floor — Deck, floor, whatever it bloody is! — not creak under his feet. Thom grunted, smacked his lips, and resumed snoring.

There was no time to worry about Thom. The footsteps were right outside. Taking up his quarterstaff, Mat placed himself in front of the door and waited.

The door swung open slowly, and two cloaked men, one behind the other, were faintly outlined by dim moonlight through the hatch at the top of the ladder they had crept down. The moonlight was enough to glint off bare knife blades. Both men gasped; they obviously had not expected to find anyone waiting for them.

Mat thrust with the quarterstaff, catching the first man hard right under where his ribs joined together. He heard his father's voice as he struck. It's a killing blow, Mat. Don't ever use it unless it's your life. But those knives made it for his life; there was no room in the cabin for swinging a staff.

Even as the man made a choking sound and folded toward the deck, fighting vainly for breath, Mat stepped forward and drove the end of the quarterstaff over him into the second man's throat with a loud crunch. That fellow dropped his knife to clutch at his throat, and fell on top of his companion, both of them scraping their boots across the deck, death rattles already sounding in their throats.

Mat stood there, staring down at them. Two men. No, burn me, three! I don't think I ever hurt another human being before, and now I've killed three men in one night. Light!

Silence filled the dark passageway, and he heard the thump of boots on the deck overhead. The crewmen all went barefoot.

Trying not to think about what he was doing, Mat ripped the cloak from one of the dead men and settled it around his shoulders, hiding the pale linen of his smallclothes. On bare feet he padded down the passage and climbed the ladder, barely sticking his eyes above the hatch coping.

Pale moonlight reflected off the taut sails, but night still covered the deck with shadows, and there was no sound except the rush of water along the vessel's sides. Only one man at the tiller, the hood of his cloak pulled up against the chill, seemed to be on deck. The man shifted, and boot leather scuffed on the deck planks.

Holding the quarterstaff low and hoping it would not be noticed, Mat climbed on up. “He's dead,” he muttered in a low, rough whisper.

“I hope he squealed when you cut his throat.” The heavily accented voice was one Mat remembered calling from the mouth of a twisting street in Tar Valon. “This boy, he causes us too much of the trouble. Wait! Who are you?”

Mat swung the staff with all his strength. The thick wood smashed into the man's head, the hood of his cloak only partly muffling a sound like a melon hitting the floor.

The man fell across the tiller, shoving it over, and the vessel lurched, staggering Mat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a shape rising out of the shadows by the railing, and the gleam of a blade, and he knew he would never get his staff around before it struck home. Something else that shone streaked through the night and merged with the dim shape with a dull thunk. The rising motion became a fall, and a man sprawled almost at Mat's feet.

A babble of voices rose belowdecks as the ship swung again, the tiller shifting with the first man's weight.

Thom limped from the hatch in cloak and smallclothes, raising the shutter on a bull'seye lantern. “You were lucky, boy. One of those below had this lantern. Could have set the ship on fire, lying there.” The light showed a knife hilt sticking up from the chest of a man with dead, staring eyes. Mat had never seen him before; he was sure he would have remembered someone with that many scars on his face. Thom kicked a dagger away from the dead man's outflung hand, then bent to retrieve his own knife, wiping the blade on the corpse's cloak. “Very lucky, boy. Very lucky indeed.”

There was a rope tied to the stern rail. Thom stepped over to it, shining the light down astern, and Mat joined him. At the other end of the rope was one of the small boats from Southharbor, its square lantern extinguished. Two more men stood among the pulledin oars.

“The Great Lord take me, it's him!” one of them gasped. The other darted forward to work frantically at the knot holding the rope.

“You want to kill these two as well?” Thom asked, his voice booming as it did when he performed.

“No, Thom,” Mat said quietly. “No.”

The men in the boat must have heard the question and not the answer, for they abandoned the attempt to free their boat and leaped over the side with great splashes. The sound of them thrashing away across the river was loud.

“Fools,” Thom muttered. “The river narrows somewhat after Tar Valon, but it must still be half a mile or more wide here. They'll never make it in the dark.”

“By the Stone!” came a shout from the hatch. “What happens here? There are dead men in the passageway! What's Vasa doing lying on the tiller? He'll run us onto a mudbank!” Naked save for linen underbreeches, Mallia dashed to the tiller, hauling the dead man off, roughly as he pulled the long lever to put the course straight again. “That isn't Vasa! Burn my soul, who are all these dead men?” Others were clambering on deck now, barefoot crewmen and frightened passengers wrapp